Books

Email smfleegal(at)hotmail(dot)com to buy a copy directly from me, pretty please--they're cheaper and I sign em, so it's me: 2, Amazon: 0.

Versus (BlazeVOX 2011)

Stacia Fleegal just can't stop creating serious noise in her poems. She's a writer who isn't afraid to make words crackle and snap, especially about how social class works in America, starting at the bottom and going up. So, fair to say, you should expect something other than the tame lyric in this collection. Poetry this political often makes people nervous and want to look away. Better that we had many more nervous readers and much more poetry as honest, direct, and inventive as what is found here in Versus.

-Eloise Klein Healy, author of The Islands Project: Poems for Sappho and founder and editor of Arktoi Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press

Grounded in our contemporary culture, where wealth and power are being redefined, Fleegal's poems express the anger of a generation disenfranchised by its presumed privilege. She unceremoniously exposes an america that has lost its status as a proper noun, and she argues for the right to "love with a capital V." These are statements of protest, cries for solidarity--but cannot be mistaken for slogans. Each poem is a sharp-edged gem crafted into a collection that is in dialogue with itself and with the reader: where "I don't" follows "I do" and "she can't" leads to "you can."

-Ren Powell, author of Mercy Island, founding editor of Babel Fruit and Protest Poems.org, and associate editor of Poemeleon

Anatomy of a Shape-Shifter (Word Press 2010)

Stacia Fleegal makes a stunning debut with Anatomy of a Shape-Shifter. Her poems are fearless in their approaches and language, muscular in their music, savvy in their psychological observations, sexy and thoughtful at the same time. In her energetic sonnets and her own dazzling nonce forms the protean speaker changes shape as she follows the contours of growing identities and developing bodies. Her subjects are passion and childhood, passion and womanhood. Here is a poet of consummate craft and candor who will distinguish herself immediately among her generation of poets with this first volume.

—Molly Peacock, author of The Second Blush 
 
With a ferocious elegance, with a mind made of pleasure, Stacia Fleegal's poems hurt beautifully, their formal remonstrations and excavations artful. This is song, and singing along to the off-key wordlessness of memory, the iambs earned, the fathers and mother and lovers and sister gathered together where they belong at last, in scintillating poems.

—Alan Michael Parker, author of Elephants & Butterflies 

'[T]he anatomy of/a kiss is more than mouths,' states Stacia Fleegal's narrator in her courageous and smart debut collection. This narrator also knows that the body is more than flesh, family is more than relation, and language is more than what we say to one another. These vital and startling poems navigate the difficult spaces of our lives, the 'gutsy, fist-bitten desire' of bodies, turning complicated experience into living, breathing objects, beautifully rendered and unforgettably accurate.

— Aaron Smith, author of Blue on Blue Ground